05/11/15

You’re on the Front Line of the Islamic War

By: Alan Caruba
Warning Signs

Does anyone remember what happened on September 11, 2001? Or is it just “ancient history” at this point? Some three thousand totally innocent Americans were murdered by a sneak attack on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Who did it? The same murderous Islamists who attacked an event in Garland, Texas to focus attention on the insanity that passes for one of the world’s great “religions.”

Islam is not a religion. It is a cult around the so-called prophet Mohammad and his assertion that the Koran was the word of Allah. The name Islam means “submission” and the purpose of Islam is the tyrannical control over the entire world’s population. Within this alleged holy faith, two sects, Shiites and Sunnis, have been at war almost from its inception, never failing to kill one another.

The turmoil in the Middle East is the direct result of this murderous cult and those Muslims who oppose the killing that flows from Islam must keep their silence or become its victims. Jews and Christians can speak out and debate about aspects of their faiths, but Muslim risk death when they do so. For those Jews in Christians living in Middle Eastern nations, death is always a prospect for no other reason than not being Muslim.

Americans have not yet fully embraced the fact that they are on the front lines along with other Western nations in a global war with Islam.

Will it take another 9/11? Surely the recent attack by two Islamists on May 3rd in Garland, Texas, was another wake up call. They arrived intent on killing as many of those attending the American Freedom Defense Initiative event. A Garland police officer killed both before anyone had to die in the name of the Bill of Rights.

But why Garland, Texas? Because, as my friend Amil Imani noted in a recent commentary, “The venue was chosen as a defiant response to a Muslim group that had held a conference entitled ‘Stand With the Prophet Against Terror and Hate.”’ Ironic, eh? Their response to the event that invited cartoons of Muhammed as to want to kill the participants. If that is not war, I do not know what is.

If Muslims feel hatred, they have earned it here in the United States and elsewhere they have attacked any criticism or defiance, from Charlie Hebdo in France to the countless attacks around the world from Mumbai, India to Bali. A website, the Religion of Peace, com, posts news of the daily assaults by Muslim on both other Muslims and those they call “infidels”, unbelievers.

Pamela Geller who leads the American Freedom Defense Initiative has been widely assailed for her event that was intended to respond to the earlier one in Garland that Amil Amani noted “was convened to eliminate free speech or any expression, verbal and/or artwork depicting the Islamic prophet Mohammad in a negative light.”

“As a life-long expert on the subject of Islam, I felt that this event—more than anything else Pamela could have done—would be the target of a violence terrorist attack in the name of the religion of peace, either real and explosive or on social media at the very least.” It was real.

The Garland police were taking it seriously. Amani said “I was astonished at the large police presence already there. Some of the cops were dressed in tactical gear and carrying AR-15s. The security was ubiquitous, almost as if something untoward had already happened.”

Speaking in an interview with Sean Hannity on May 6, Geller noted that neither the FBI nor the Department of Homeland Security has yet to have contacted her about the thwarted attack. “This is a serious threat” said Hannity. “Basically a Fatwah, a death threat, has now been issued.” Geller noted the lack of interest or concern expressed by those in our government one might expect to at the least make an inquiry, adding that “I have a team now, private security, and NYPD counterterror has been in touch with me.”

Now I call that a level of courage for which Pamela Geller should be praised, but I heard too many criticisms that she was being “provocative.”

“Provocative”?????

When are Americans going to realize that the Islamists do not need any provocation? When are we going to start acting like we are at war? A good first step would be to stop inviting Muslims to immigrate to America. The Obama administration has been importing as many as possible. The next step is to understand that it is Obama and his administration that are part of the Islamic war.

It is the Pamela Geller’s that are crying out to us. We need to listen. We need to support them. We need to arm ourselves if we have not done so already. Then we need to secure “concealed carry” laws in every State of the Union. We are at war.

04/28/15

Israel Will Attack Iran Soon

By: Alan Caruba
Warning Signs

The Israelis will destroy several Iranian nuclear facilities and my educated guess is that they will do so before the end of this year.

Israel has no margin of error when it comes to nuclear reactors in nations that threaten its existence. While President Obama does everything in his power to enable Iran to create its own nuclear weapons, it is a good idea to recall that in June 1981 the Israelis destroyed a reactor in Iraq. It was the first air strike against such a facility. In September 2007, the Israelis destroyed a Syrian reactor. There was no reprisal in either case.

From Wednesday, April 22 to Friday April 24 the Israelis struck Hizbollah and Syrian military targets in the Walamoun Mountains on the Syrian-Lebanese border. The calculations were that the location, a site for long-range missiles, would be safer from the Israelis. They were wrong.

In September 2014, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the United Nations General Assembly warning “don’t be fooled by Iran’s manipulative charm offensive. It’s designed for one purpose and for one purpose only. To lift the sanctions and remove the obstacles to Iran’s path to the bomb.”

“Once Iran produces atomic bombs, all the charm and all the smiles will suddenly disappear. They’ll just vanish. It’s then that the ayatollahs will show their true face and unleash their aggressive fanaticism on the entire world.” He offered a comparable message to a joint meeting of Congress in March of this year.

Is anyone listening? Not President Obama. On April 25, writing in The Wall Street Journal, Mortimer Zuckerman, the chairman and editor in chief of the U.S. News and World Report, said “President Obama has been chasing a rainbow in his negotiations with Iran. He has forsaken decades of pledges to the civilized world from presidents of both parties. He has misled the American people in repeatedly affirming that the U.S. would never allow revolutionary Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.”

It’s bad enough when you can’t trust your nation’s enemies, but when you cannot trust your own President you have a very big problem because Iran is not just a threat to America and Israel, but to the entire world.

Obama’s anti-Semitism is obvious to anyone paying the least attention. He particularly loathes Israel. In early April the White House let its unhappiness be known that Netanyahu had, in its words, failed to tone down “hostile and aggressive language” of the Passover religious service. What were those words? “Next year in Jerusalem.”

This is an ancient Jewish prayer that sustained generations of Jews over the course of two millennia, expressing their hope to return to their homeland. To the White House, however, it was “affront to the Palestinians, not to mention a slap in the face to President Obama himself who has worked tirelessly for peace despite Israeli intransigence.” The Jews returned to Israel, declared its independence in 1948, and have had the support of every President since…until Obama.

The Israelis know this. Since their independence the Israelis have fought seven recognized wars, two Palestinian intifadas, and a series of armed conflicts in the broader Arab-Israeli conflict. Most recently they put down Hamas in the Gaza once again for its repeated rocketing.

Despite or because of this, the Israelis have sought to demonstrate good will toward their Arab neighbors. There is an untold story of the December 2014 meeting of six Gulf Cooperation Council rulers in the Qatari capital of Doha to discuss steps to respond to challenges that include Iranian aggression and clamping down on the Muslim Brotherhood.

Sources close to event report that Netanyahu has achieved close coordination with the most important Arab leaders that include Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Other members of the Council include Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates.

The Israelis have no choice, nor do I anticipate that Iran will do much, if anything, to respond in the wake of the ashes of those facilities. No other nation will come to their aid.

04/1/15

Obama’s Virtual War on Israel

By: Alan Caruba
Warning Signs

This is hardly the best week to demonstrate his intense hatred of Israel, but since he has devoted 18 months to a fruitless and foolish negotiation with Iran, one can understand why Barack Hussein Obama is in a bad mood. His foreign policy “legacy” is close to being flushed down the Iranian toilet.

On March 31, the Defense of Democracies’ Iran Press Review quoted the Deputy Commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, Brigadier General Masoud Jazayeri, who said, “All should know that we will not allow the inspection of the country’s military and defense industries.” Or, as they say in Farsi, “No deal.”

This week began with Palm Sunday celebrating Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem and proceeds to Good Friday which, at sundown, coincides with the Jewish observance of Passover and Christianity’s “last supper.” It concludes with Easter; holy days that occurred in the holy land that was Israel then and now.

Jesus was a Jew preaching primarily to Jews, whose disciples were Jews, and doing so entirely in Israel, the homeland of Jews for more than a thousand years at that time. The ancestors of Arabs in those days would have been regarded as Assyrians or Egyptians. The people called “Palestinians” did not exist until designated as such by Yassir Arafat in the 1960s.

So why is Obama leading a virtual war on Israel by declassifying information about Israel’s nuclear defenses and a purported effort to get the United Nations to declare “Palestine” a separate state?

At what point will it be understood that the United Nations has no power to create states or to grant formal “recognition” to state aspirants and that the Palestinian Authority and/or Hamas does not meet even the most basic characteristics of a state, lacking for example either a capitol or a currency.

As spelled out in the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, “Palestine” would have to have a permanent population, a defined territory, a government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states. By contrast, the current president of the Palestinian Authority is now into his eleventh year of a term that, by their own law, is limited to four.

Not only have the “Palestinians” refused statehood and a two-state relationship since the founding of Israel, but they have participated in large wars and small against Israel, beginning with one in 1948 when Israel declared its statehood. Despite 1949 Armistice Agreements, reprisal operations continued through to the 1960s from Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. The Six-Day war occurred in June 1967 and the Yom Kippur War was fought in 1973.

Focusing on the “Palestinians”, the First Intifada, an uprising against Israel in the West Bank and Gaza occurred from 1987 to 1993. It was followed by a Second Intifada from 2000 to 2005. Responding to escalating rocket fire, there was a three-week Gaza War from December 2008 to January 2009 and in 2014, the Israelis had to respond to weeks of rockets again.

Obama has turned to the United Nations knowing that it took the UN seventy years to even acknowledge the January 28-28 anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz Birkenau, the Nazi death camp in which millions of Jews perished. The UN has studiously avoided the subject of anti-Semitism because that would only call attention to the fact that it has been the global platform for anti-Semitism since its founding in 1945.

A perfect example has been its Human Rights Council that has always included nations famed for their own lack of human rights. When it began its March 2nd session since electing 14 new members last fall, it included Saudi Arabia, Cuba, China and Russia. By the end of March, the Human Rights Council had declared Israel the world’s leading woman’s rights violator and followed up with a general condemnation, adopting four resolutions condemning Israel, four times more than any other of the 192 members of the UN.

This is the same UN that in 2014 elected Iran to its woman’s rights commission, that selected genocidal Sudan and other slave-holding nations to its Committee on Non-Governmental Organizations to oversee human rights activists, and whose UNRWA handed rockets found in Gaza schools back to Hamas. By acclamation, a senior post on the US Special Committee on Decolonization was given to the murderous regime of Syria.

The question of whether Israel is guilty of war crimes was raised in the UN when, after weeks of rocketing from Gaza, it defended itself with an air and land war. It followed the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teenagers in June 2014. Operation Protective Edge began on July 8 and lasted seven weeks. In the course of it, they discovered over thirty tunnels whose purpose was to provide access to Israel for attacks on its citizens. Apparently self-defense is not a privilege the UN wants to extend to Israel.

In last Saturday’s issue of The New York Times, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, founder of the World Values Network, took out a full page advertisement comparing the deal to empower Iran to make its own nuclear weapons to the 1933 Munich Agreement by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain with Adolf Hitler that led to World War II. In the Jerusalem Great Synagogue on the same day, the American-born Chief Rabbi said, “The President of the United States is lashing out at Israel just like Haman lashed out at the Jews.”

No doubt this will be on the minds of Jews, less than 0.2% of the world’s population, when they sit down to celebrate Passover, remembering their enslavement in Egypt and the exodus that led them to freedom. Jesus celebrated Passover and the Kingdom of God. He would pay for it when the Romans put him to death shortly thereafter.

It is futile to think that Obama will cease from his assaults on Israel in the remaining 22 months of his second and final term in office. Those who know the history cited above must join hands to resist this latest enemy of Israel, this disgrace to America who is already widely regarded as the worst, most lawless President ever elected to that office.

03/26/15

Terrifying the Republican Establishment

By: Alan Caruba
Warning Signs

Ted Cruz announces candidacy

Would you vote for a man who openly says he would repeal ObamaCare?

Would you vote for a man who openly says he favors a fair tax and wants to abolish the Internal Revenue Service?

Would you vote for a man who opposes Obama’s efforts to offer illegal aliens amnesty and promises to secure the borders?

Would you vote for a man who decries a federal government “that wages an assault on our religious liberty”?

Would you vote for a man who wants a federal government that “works to defend the sanctity of human life” and would “uphold the sacrament of marriage”?

Would you vote for a man who defends our Second Amendment rights and condemns the effort ban ammunition?

Would you vote for a man who condemns a federal government that seeks to dictate school curriculums and wants to repeal “every word of Common Core”?

Would you vote for a man who would stand “unapologetically with the nation of Israel”?

Would you vote for a man who has pledged that he would do everything he could to ensure that Iran does not acquire a nuclear weapon?

Would you vote for a man who openly says he would do everything he could to defeat radical Islamic terrorism?

I said I would on May 6, 2013 when he was beginning to get attention. Columnist George Will said he was “as good as it gets” when it comes to being a true conservative in Congress.

I am of course speaking of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) who has announced his candidacy to be the presidential candidate of the Republican Party.

I suspect that his announcement probably terrifies the Republican “Establishment” who have managed to serve up some good men, but poor candidates, to be President. When Republican voters stayed home, we got Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.

Now they want to get the Party faithful to vote for Jeb Bush, but from my vantage point, the real base is ready to vote for anybody else, Sen. Cruz, Wisconsin Gov. Walker, and Sen. Rubio come to mind.

First of all, there is no Tea Party in the sense of a political party with its own candidates. What there is are Republicans who believe in the U.S. Constitution, small government, fiscal prudence, strong national security, and all those other values outlined in Ted Cruz’s speech at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia.

As Cruz said in an email about his announcement “Washington, D.C. has become completely disconnected from the values of real Americans. That’s why we are now more than $18 trillion in debt, why wages have stagnated, and why our foreign policy is an absolute mess.” That pretty much sums up what Obama has delivered.

Does it surprise anyone that Cruz’s candidacy was instantly attacked, not just by Democrats, but by a number of leading Republicans? Rep. Peter King, appearing on CNN’s “Situation Room” with host Wolf Blitzer, said, he’d “jump off that bridge” when he got to it if Cruz becomes the GOP candidate. He also accused Cruz and Rand Paul of being “counterfeit conservatives.” Nonsense!

The March 24 Wall Street Journal had a lengthy editorial devoted to “The Cruz Candidacy” noting that on most issues with the exception of immigration they found themselves in agreement with him and offered an upbeat view that “The good news for GOP voters is that their field of candidates in 2016 is going to be deep, offering many varieties of conservative leadership” but ending with reservations about “his polarizing style” which was another way of saying he is not a wishy-washy centrist.

We will hear more such accusations and criticisms and, as often as not, they will come from the GOP Establishment.

The GOP Establishment regards real conservatives as unable to secure election, preferring RINOs, Republicans in Name Only, and candidates who move as close to the center politically as possible. It seems to have escaped their notice that the Republicans elected in the last two midterm elections were sent to Washington, D.C. by Tea Party and other serious conservative voters.

It has been a long time since a real conservative Republican, Ronald Reagan, was elected President, but it can happen again as serious voters, particularly those who are independents, join with those who find Sen. Cruz a refreshing voice, Will he get the nomination? We are a very long way from the 2016 election, but at least we know it won’t be a boring one!

03/9/15

America’s Military Power in a Steep Decline

By: Alan Caruba
Warning Signs

“Eliminating the terrorists of today with force will not guarantee protection from the terrorists of tomorrow. We have to transform the environments that give birth to these movements…It may be training young people so they can get jobs…it may be working to eliminate corruption and promote the rule of law…”

The Obama administration proposal that a jobs program be created for the militants in the Middle East was met with appropriate derision because what the jihadists need is killing. That’s what they are doing to Christians, Jews and others in the Middle East and elsewhere.

The quote above is by John Kerry, the Secretary of State, and to be fair, his February 18 Wall Street Journal commentary began by saying “The rise of violent extremism represents the pre-eminent challenge of the young 21^st Century. Military force is a rational and often necessary response to the wanton slaughters of children, mass kidnappings of schoolgirls, and beheading of innocents. But military force along won’t achieve victory.”

Kerry is wrong. History as recent as the mid-20^th century is proof enough that the military defeat of Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan was the only thing that ended the threat they represented. He was also wrong when he told a congressional committee that the world is a safer place these days when it is clear to anyone it is not.

We are being led by people who live in some alternative universe where pixie dust and unicorns exist.

The real question the Obama administration has to answer is why, since he took office in 2009, has he been systematically reducing the military power of the United States? By pulling our troops out of Iraq he created a vacuum filled by the Islamic State (ISIS) that now threatens the entire Middle East and parts of North Africa. He has since curtailed plans to pull most of our troops out of Afghanistan.

Out of sight of Americans, however, the key personnel, the leaders on which our military depends, have been subject to a purge. General Paul Vallely (Ret) has warned that “Since Barack Obama has been in the White House, high ranking military officers have been removed from their positions at a rate that is absolutely unprecedented,” adding that “He’s intentionally weakening and gutting our military and reducing us as a superpower, and anyone in the ranks who disagrees or speaks out is being purged.”

In late February, 84 former U.S. government officials, retired U.S. military leaders, and national security experts sent an open letter to the House and Senate leadership asking them to work together to end the harm that the Budget Control Act and sequestration is inflicting on our Armed Forces.

They deemed the trillion dollars of required defense spending cuts “a grave and growing danger to our national security…as threats intensify across the globe.” The cuts “are undermining the readiness of our forces today and investment in the critical capabilities they will need tomorrow.”

“In the last three years, the Army’s strength has been cut by nearly 100,000 soldiers. The Navy’s contingency response force is at one-third the level of what it should be. Less than half of the Air Force’s combat squadrons are fully ready. Approximately half of the Marine Corps non-deployed units lack sufficient personnel, equipment, and training.”

These were facts set forth in the National Defense Panel’s July 2014 report. It warned that if sequestration takes effect in fiscal year 2016, the U.S. would be facing an “immediate readiness crisis.”

This lack of readiness was the subject of a Wall Street Journal commentary, “Europe’s Defense Wanes as the Putin Threat Grows” by Ian Birrell, so it is not just the United States that lacks sufficient troops and weapons in the event of a war. Birrell noted that “With fewer than 100,000 full-time troops, Great Britain now has a smaller army than during the mid-19^th-century Crimean War.” Other members of NATO have cut their defense budgets in recent years. He warned that “As we fight this new Cold War, Western leaders need to relearn the old lessons of crisis management and deterrence that defeated Mr. Putin’s Soviet predecessors—and relearn them quickly.”

Recall that Secretary Kerry has gone on record saying that “climate change” is the greatest threat the U.S. and the world faces. Little wonder that Chuck Hegel resigned as the former Secretary of Defense given the pressure he was under from a White House indifferent to the real problems and threats the U.S. faces.

In 2014 the Pentagon released a “Climate Change Adaptation Forecast” and any defense funds diverted to this plan were just that much less than needed for our troops in the field and the real needs of the U.S. military. Are they supposed to be fighting melting ice bergs or staying ready for potential military threats from China or Russia?

An example of the idiotic political correctness, scarce Pentagon resources are being diverted to a plan to generate 50% of the Navy’s energy needs from “alternative sources” by 2020, including $3.5 billion for biofuels. You cannot fight a global war if the Navy cannot swiftly and easily acquire oil to run its ships that are not nuclear-powered and fly its aircraft.

At the same time, the U.S. has been reducing its stockpile of nuclear arms. The State Department’s Rose Gottemoeller, under-secretary for arms control and international security, recently told a group “The U.S. commitment to achieving the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons is unassailable.” She noted that the nation’s stockpile of active weapons is down 85% from maximum cold war levels, falling to 4,804 in 2013 from a high of 31,255, adding that “We still have more work to do.”

This completely ignores nuclear nations like North Korea who have bad intentions toward the U.S. and their neighbors and it runs completely contrary to the U.S. negotiations with Iran that would permit it to become a nuclear armed nation.

This is worse than diplomatic schizophrenia; it is a plan for national suicide.

Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, recently told Congress that Russia and China have placed their highest priority on building up and maintaining strategic nuclear forces.

If you want to know what is wrong about the entire approach to our nation’s military needs, consider that since 2009 when Obama took office, the Pentagon’s civilian workforce has grown about 7% to almost 750,000, while active-duty military personnel have been cut by approximately 8%.

At the same time, dozens of military-equipment and weapons programs have been canceled, including a new Navy cruiser, a new search-and-rescue helicopter, the F-22 first-generation fighter, the C-17 transport aircraft, missile defense and the Marine Corps’ Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle.

We are not prepared to fight a war and now you know why.

03/4/15

Netanyahu and Jewish Survival

By: Alan Caruba
Warning Signs

In 1933, approximately 9.5 million Jews lived in Europe, representing 1.7% of the total European population which, in turn, was about 60% of the Jewish world population, estimated to have been 15.2 million.

By 1945, in the wake of the Holocaust, two out of every three Jews would be dead.

By 2012 the global Jewish population had reached 13.75 million. That is less than 0.2 percent of the world’s population.

The Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics reported that 43% of the world’s Jewish community lives in Israel. Sharing Israel as their home were 1,636,600 Arabs and a diverse population of Christians and non-Jews, numbering around 318,000.

If the Iranians make good on their threat to “wipe Israel off the map”, presumably with nuclear weapons they would acquire by stealth and deception, the Jewish world population would be cut nearly in half.

All of this will be on Benjamin Netanyahu’s mind when, as the Prime Minister of Israel, he addresses a joint meeting of Congress. It will be his third such speech. On July 10, 1996, he said the world must act to prevent Iran’s nuclearization, since “the deadline for attaining this goal is getting extremely close.”

In 2011 he returned, saying “When I stood here, I spoke of the consequences of Iran developing nuclear weapons. Now time is running out. The hinge of history may soon turn, for the greatest danger of all could soon be upon us, a militant Islamic regime armed with nuclear weapons.”

So now it is 2015 and the only thing Netanyahu knows for sure is that the Iranians remain intent on being able to produce their own nuclear weapons.

The March 2nd edition of The Times of Israel reported that Yukiya Amano, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said “Iran has yet to provide explanations that enable the agency to clarify two outstanding practical measures”, a diplomatic way of referring to “alleged explosive tests and other issues related to research that may also be useful for military uses of atomic energy.” This is the same problem that the U.N. agency has with North Korea.

Netanyahu was worried about Iran’s nuclear weapons program in 1996, in 2011, and now in 2015; more than enough time for Iran to have made considerable progress toward their goal. At the heart of this third address to Congress is the survival of nearly half of all the Jews in the world because they live in Israel.

It’s no secret there is no love-loss between Bibi Netanyahu and Barack Obama, but this third effort to urge Congress to go on record supporting the survival of Israel is necessary because, for the first time since 1948, there is some cause to wonder whether a war-weary U.S. would come to Israel’s defense.

Obama has said in no uncertain terms that he wants to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. However, the world has learned that the gap between what he says and what he does is often wide or non-existent. It must be said, however, that past Presidents have decried North Korea’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, but that has not translated into any direct action because China entered the Korean conflict in the 1950s to defend it and no one wants a repeat of that.

Netanyahu does not speak for “all Jews.” He speaks for Israel and other than national survival the political divisions there are even more diverse than our own. The fact that he is running for reelection there is not a factor for his speech to Congress—timing is.

One suspects that the best intelligence both Israel and the U.S. have been able to secure suggests that, this time, Iran is very close to its goal of being able to produce its own nuclear weapons despite the sanctions that have been imposed.

Netanyahu is understandably concerned about the negotiations that Obama has relentlessly pursued with Iran, the result of which has alienated not only Israel, but Saudi Arabia and all of the Gulf nations. The P5+1 parties to the negotiations include Russia, China, France, United Kingdom and Germany. The negotiations have deadlocked in the past and may do so again despite the fact that both Russia and China have close ties to Iran.

Even if Iran agrees to terms that would supposedly slow or stop its nuclear weapons program, there is not a scintilla of evidence that they would fulfill their promises. Iran, after all, is the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism worldwide.

The odds are that Netanyahu knows that Iran, this time, is very close to becoming militarily nuclear. Addressing Congress calls attention to the danger, not only domestically, but worldwide.

What Netanyahu also knows is that President Obama seems to have blind spot when it comes to the growing anti-Semitism that resembles what existed in the 1930s in Europe. When Jews in a French kosher supermarket were murdered, Obama referred to it as an act of “violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.”

Whoa! It wasn’t “a bunch of folks.” They were Jews buying food for the Sabbath meal. And those “violent, vicious zealots” were Muslims, just like the ISIS Muslims beheading, crucifying, burning, kidnapping, and enslaving those they don’t kill for being Christian, Jewish, Yazidis, or just not Muslim enough!

Netanyahu’s speech will, indeed, be historic. It may not be his last visit to the chambers of Congress.

03/3/15

Obama Negotiates Israel’s Destruction

By: Alan Caruba
Warning Signs

The strangest thing about Obama’s efforts to achieve friendly relations with Iran, something he has tried to do since he first took office in 2009, is that Iran has made it abundantly clear since its Islamic revolution in 1979 that it hates America and, in tandem, Israel as well.

In an Iranian naval drill on February 25, Iran blew up a mock U.S. aircraft carrier near the entrance of the Persian Gulf. It was a full-size replica of the USS Nimitz. This is the antithesis of friendship, but just to make their position clear, Iranian Rear Adm. Ali Fadavi, commander of its naval forces, let it be known that “We have the most advanced sea mines which cannot be imagined by the Americans.”

But the Americans—in this case the President of the United States and his negotiators—have been making every concession they can to get an agreement that would limit Iran’s ability to produce its own nuclear weapons. Dr. Norman Bailey, an adjunct professor of economic statecraft at the Institute of World Politics, Washington, D.C., recently wrote that “The U.S. looks set to present its allies with a dangerous fait accompli on Iran’s nuclear program.”

“The most recent deadline of March 24th means only one thing,” Dr. Bailey wrote in a World Tribune commentary. “A deal has been reached between the U.S. and Iran, which will be announced to the other five participants when the Obama administration decides it is convenient to do so.” The other five obviously have nothing to say regarding the negotiations. At one point, the French foreign minister stormed out of the initial meeting proclaiming “This is a fool’s deal.”

It’s worse than a fool’s deal. It is a deal that is predicated on the nuclear destruction of Israel and, after that, the U.S. is next. One might think that Obama knows this and one might be right. People like Mayor Rudy Giuliani have long noticed that Obama doesn’t seem to like America very much.

A commentary by Lawrence Sellin, PhD, a retired colonel with 29 years of service in the U.S. Army Reserve, and tours of service in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Major General Paul E. Vallely, U.S. Army, retired, noted that the nuclear agreement did not include measures that would prevent any cooperation between Iran and North Korea or other rogue states. This has not gone unnoticed by the Israelis. Intelligence Minister, Yuval Steinitz, has noted that “We all know that Iran, Syria and North Korea are very close to each other.”

North Korea has its own nuclear weapons program and, as Dr. Sellin and Maj. Gen. Vallely, warned, “Unless specifically prohibited and enforced within the terms and conditions” of the deal, “Tehran may attempt to sidestep the protocols by ‘outsourcing’ parts of the bomb production process to North Korea, Iran’s long-term partner on everything from launch missiles to guidance systems to nuclear war head technology and other required components.”

Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, a party to the negotiations with Secretary John Kerry, met with a visiting North Korean deputy foreign minister, Ri Gil Song, shortly after February 2014 Vienna discussions. Fars News reported that their meetings were devoted to “bolstering and reinvigorating the two countries’ bilateral ties.”

Anyone recall George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil”? It was Iran, North Korea, and Iraq.

In case you are less than confident of Iran’s intentions, in 2013 before the previous nuclear negotiations were concluded, according to the Fars News Agency, the regimes’ outlet run by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Gen. Massoud Jazayeri, the deputy chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces, said “America’s interests and all of Israel are within the range of the Islamic Republic and there is not the slightest doubt among Iran’s armed forces to confront the American government and the Zionists (Israel).”

The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu will address a joint session of Congress on Tuesday. On September 29, 2014, he addressed the United Nations. The message will be the same. Any deal with Iran will be a bad deal for Israel which has been in the crosshairs of the Iranians since they came to power in 1979. This isn’t an “existential” threat. It is a threat that can and will destroy Israel if permitted to occur. Obama’s negotiations will leave Israel no other option than to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.

If the U.S. Congress has the means to deter and render Obama’s negotiations null and void, they had better do so. On September 26, 2007, the U.S. Senate passed legislation by a vote of 76-22 designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization. The long record of Iran and its state-sponsored terrorism can be found by visiting Wikipedia.

What we are witnessing is a level of insane appeasement comparable to that of the 1930s when European nations refused to acknowledge Nazi Germany’s clear intention to conquer them.

Iran’s intentions are known to Obama and no doubt to our Congress. They are surely known to Israel and the Gulf nations. If history is any guide, these negotiations will put the world on the path to a cataclysm that defies the imagination.

03/1/15

Green Slander

By: Alan Caruba
Warning Signs

It is a sure sign that the advocates of the “global warming” and “climate change” hoaxes know that the public no longer believes that the former is occurring or that the latter represents an immediate, global threat.

Even though the “climate skeptics”, scientists who have produced research proving false methodology and the conclusions based on it are quite few in number, an effort to silence them by smearing their reputations and denying funding for their work has been launched and it is based entirely on a lie.

Scientists are supposed to be skeptical, not only of other scientist’s findings, but their own. Good science must be able to reproduce the results of published research. In the case of the many computer models cited as proof that global warming was occurring or would, the passing years have demonstrated that none were accurate.

As Joseph L. Bast, president of The Heartland Institute and Joseph A. Morris, an attorney who has fought in several countries to defend free speech, wrote in a February 24 commentary, “The Crucifixion of Dr. Wei-Hock Soon”, of an article co-authored with Christopher Monckton, Matt Briggs, and David Legates, and published in the Science Bulletin, a publication of the Chinese Academy of Sciences “The article reveals what appears to be an error in the computer models used to predict global warming that leads models to over-estimate future warming by a factor of three.” (Emphasis added) Their commentary has been downloaded more than 10,000 times!

“If the work of Soon et al is confirmed by other scientists, the ‘global warming crisis’ may need to be cancelled and we can all enjoy lower taxes, fewer regulations, and more personal freedom.” However, “having failed to refute the article, environmentalists turned to smearing the authors.”

Little wonder the “Warmists” are worried; the Earth has been in a cooling cycle since 1996. People are noticing just how cold this record-breaking and record-setting winter is.

The attack on Dr. Soon began with a Greenpeace news release that was republished on the front page of The New York Times on February 22nd. Despite its august reputation, The Times’ coverage of climate issues has been an utter disgrace for decades. As public interest waned, it eliminated its staff of reporters exclusively devoted to writing about the “environment.”

Myron Ebell, a climate change skeptic and director of Global Warming and International Environmental Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, noted on February 27th that the Greenpeace attack on Dr. Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics claimed they had secured $1.2 million in funding for his research over the past decade and that it came from energy corporations, electric utilities, and charitable foundations related to those companies. The truth, however, is “that the grants were made not to Dr. Soon but to the Smithsonian, which never complained while taking its sizable cut off the top.”

Columnist Larry Bell who is also an endowed professor at the University of Houston, disputed the Greenpeace claim, saying, “First, let’s recognize that the supporting FOIA documents referred to an agreement between the Smithsonian (not Dr. Soon) and Southern Company Services, Inc., whereby 40 percent of that more than $1.2 million went directly to the Smithsonian” leaving “an average funding of $71,000 a year for the past eleven years to support the actual research activities.”

Focusing on Greenpeace and its Climate Investigations Center which describes itself as “a group funded by foundations seeking to limit the risks of climate change”, Bell asked “Do these activist organizations make their estimated $360,000,000 annual funding publicly available?” Bell said “Ad hominem assaults disparaging the integrity of this leading authority on relationships between solar phenomena and global climate are unconscionable.”

In his article, “Vilifying realist science—and scientists”, Paul Driessen, a policy advisor to the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), noted that in 2012 Greenpeace USA was the recipient of $32,791,149 and that this is true of other environmental pressure groups that in 2012 secured $111,915.138 for the Environmental Defense Fund, $98,701,707 for the Natural Resources Defense Council, $97,757,678 for the Sierra Club, and, for Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, $19,150,215.

“All told,” noted Driessen, “more than 16,000 American environmental groups collect(ed) total annual revenues of over $13.4 billion (2009 figures). Only a small part of that comes from membership dues and individual contributions.” With that kind of money you can do a lot of damage to scientist’s reputation.

They fear that the public may actually learn the truth about “global warming” and the fear-mongering claims about “climate change” does not stop with just the environmental organizations. At the same time The New York Times was printing the Greenpeace lies, U.S. Senators Ed Market (D-Mass), Barbara Boxer (D-CA), and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) joined together on February 25th to send letters to 107 companies, trade associations, and non-profit groups demanding comprehensive information about all funding of research on climate or related issues.

Among the groups receiving the letter were two for whom I am a policy advisor, The Heartland Institute and CFACT, but others include the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the George C. Marshall Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and the American Energy Alliance.

Following The New York Times article, Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, sent letters to the presidents of seven universities asking them to provide details about seven professors who are either prominent global warming skeptics.

As Rich Lowrey, editor of the National Review, pointed out on February 27th, that “Science as an enterprise usually doesn’t need political enforcers. But proponents of a climate alarmism that demands immediate action to avert worldwide catastrophe won’t and can’t simply let the science speak for itself.”

This is not fact-finding. It is an act of intimidation.

And it looks like a carefully organized effort to quash any research that might dispute “global warming” or “climate change” as defined by the Greens and by both the President and the Secretary of State as the greatest threat we and the rest of the world faces.

The greatest threat is the scores of environmental organizations that have been exaggerating and distorting their alleged “science” in order to thwart development here and around the world that would enhance everyone’s life. Now they are attacking real scientists, those who are skeptical of their claims, to silence them.

This is what fascists do.

02/25/15

The Right to Say No

By: Alan Caruba
Warning Signs

Something very unpleasant is occurring in America. Those who have a strong religious faith are being denied the right to say “no” based on its teachings and values. This is particularly true these days as homosexuals, barely three percent of the population, demand that they be accommodated when their demand runs counter to thousands of years of what has been deemed moral behavior and, for many, still is.

When it comes to marriage. Gays insist they have a “right” to get married and call their union “marriage”, but there is absolutely nothing in the thousands of years of the Judeo-Christian ethic that defines same-sex unions as either moral or legal.

The most recent and egregious example of what can happen when someone obeys God rather than the state is Arlene’s Flowers, a small floral shop in Richland, Washington. Its owner, Barronelle Stuzman, declined to make flower arrangements for a gay couple’s wedding and, instead of finding a shop that would, they took their grievance to court. A judge ruled Ms. Stutzman violated the state’s anti-discrimination and consumer protection laws.

I find it odd that one cannot refuse to render a service or sell a product if that decision is based on one’s religious beliefs. Isn’t that a form of discrimination against religion? Yes, it is.

Commenting on these increasing cases filed by homosexuals, the noted conservative writer, Selwyn Duke, said “It is a new front in the war on faith, legitimate freedom and private property rights. Many point out that it constitutes an unprecedented trampling of religious liberty and this is true.”

America is a nation based on its Founder’s beliefs that the rights of its citizens came from God, not the state. Something is very wrong when judges ignore that fundamental truth.

Anti-discrimination laws have the intent of ensuring the right of people to be treated equally. Not all such laws are the same. Some permit exemptions based on religion or gender. The reality that women are different from men has seen some nations such as ours exclude them from serving in a frontline combat role or aboard submarines. This is a concession to reality.

Ms. Stuzman’s new reality, after forty years in business, is the loss of her business due to the fines that have been assessed, along with the cost of legal fees. “They want my home, they want my business, they want my personal finances as an example for other people to be quiet,” said Ms. Stuzman. The gay couple may love each other, but they have demonstrated their belief in their right to marry permits them to inflict an enormous harm on a 70-year-old florist. There is something truly obscene about that.

In August of last year, a same-sex couple from Newark requested the use of the Liberty Ridge Farm for their wedding ceremony and was denied. In order to comply with a court order that they make their farm available despite their religious convictions, Cynthia and Robert Gifford, the owners of the farm near Albany, N.Y., have decided to no longer host any wedding or other ceremonies.

It’s not like the New Testament isn’t quite clear regarding the issue of homosexuality:

Leviticus 18:22 “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.”

1 Corinthians 6:9-11 “Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our Go.”

Romans 1:26-28 “For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.”

Under Islam, you can be put to death for homosexuality.

Here in America, it is not the homosexuals who are subject to restrictions. It is people of faith who are being told they must provide services and products to them in the context if they intend to marry or as a reflection of their gender preference.

Urloved Photography is a small business in Northern California specializing in wedding and event photograph. In response to a request from a gay couple, Urlove replied with an email that said “Thanks so much for contacting us and for your very kind words. We feel that photographing a gay wedding is not the best match for us, however we can refer you to a colleague who would make a great match. We wish you the very best!” In California, however, one cannot reject business on the basis of sexual orientation.

Some states are trying to extend a measure of legal protection against the demands of homosexuals. In Kansas, its Federal and State Affairs committee has passed a bill aimed at protecting individuals, groups and businesses that refuse for religious reasons to recognize same-sex marriages or provide benefits to gay couples. Kansas law already protects employees from being sanctioned based on religious beliefs.

Federal judges have recently struck down bans on gay marriage in Oklahoma and Utah. In Indiana legislation to protect residents with strong religious beliefs from having to provide services and products to same-sex weddings is under consideration. In October, however, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Indiana’s gay marriage ban.

Our states are sovereign republics in their own right. That should be respected.

We are witnessing the arrogance of the homosexual community pitting itself against millennia of tradition and spiritual belief. Can’t find a photographer, florist or baker who wants to provide services for your same-sex wedding? Find someone who will.

Instead, states are caving into homosexual demands and asking their residents to abandon the reality that marriage is intended solely for a man and a woman.

02/24/15

It’s an Ice Age for Sure

By: Alan Caruba
Warning Signs

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire.
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate.
To say that for destruction ice Is also great.
And would suffice.
— Robert Frost, American poet.

Robert W. Felix borrowed from the poet Robert Frost for the title of his book, “Not by Fire, But by Ice”, first published in 1997 and devoted to the science of magnetic reversals and the Earth’s ice ages. I read it first in 2010 and was absolutely floored because Felix makes a very strong case for a reversal that would lead to a widespread extinction of life at some point in the future. In the near, more predictable future, he said the Earth was heading into a new ice age.

“What would happen if a magnetic reversal occurred right here?” asked Felix. “The same things that happened in the past. Earthquakes, floods, volcanoes, giant snowstorms, rising land, plummeting sea levels—you name it—tectonic activity would go bonkers.” Don’t believe him? Think about the disappearance of the dinosaurs some 65.5 million years ago.

The Earth had been in a cooling cycle that began in 1996 when the sun entered a cycle of reduced radiation. Such cycles were well known and most dramatically tied to the mini-ice age that occurred between 1300 and 1850. Solar observers had noticed many centuries ago that when there were few sunspots—magnetic storms—on the surface of the Sun, the Earth got colder.

This has become especially dramatic because, on February 17 a post on http://thesiweather.com/category/climate-info/ called for a discussion of the fact that “The Sun has gone quiet again during the weakest solar cycle in more than a century.” The post says, “If history is a guide, it is safe to say that weak solar activity for a prolonged period of time can have a negative impact on global temperatures in the troposphere which is the bottom-most layer of Earth’s atmosphere—and where we all live.”

“There have been two notable historical periods with decades-long episodes of low solar activity. The first is known as the ‘Maunder Minimum’, named after solar astronomer Edward Maunder, and it lasted from 1645 to 1715. The second one is referred to as the ‘Dalton Minimum’, named for the English meteorologist John Dalton and it lasted from 1780 to 1830.” Together they are referred to as the “Little Ice Age.”

There are quite a few scientists forecasting a new ice age. The last ice age began approximately 1.6 million years ago in the Pleistocene epoch. We are currently in the Holocene epoch that began about 11,000 years ago and is regarded as an interglacial period of general warmth.

In his book, “Dark Winter: How the Sun is Causing a 30-Year Cold Spell”, John L. Casey, a former White House national space policy advisor, says that whatever warming has occurred has ended as the result of “solar hibernation”, a term he applies to the reduction of energy output of the Sun. The “climate change” that is occurring is a long-term reduction in the Earth’s temperatures with, says Casey, “a high probability of increased earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.”

In “Cold Sun”, another book by Casey, his says that “The most likely outcome from this ‘solar hibernation’ will be widespread global loss of life and social, economic, and political disruption. You must prepare for this life-altering event now!”

In January 2012, Matt Ridley, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, noted that “The entire 10,000-year history of civilization has happened in an unusually warm interlude in the Earth’s recent history. Over the past million years, it has been as warm as this or warmer for less than 10% of the time, during 11 brief episodes known as interglacial periods.”

Those who kept warning of a “global warming” with dire results misinterpreted the climate. Ridley noted that “It’s striking that most inter-glacials begin with an abrupt warming, peak sharply, (and) then begin a gradual descent into cooler conditions.” That is what is occurring now.

None of this has anything to do with carbon dioxide, ozone, or any other element of the Earth’s atmosphere. It is entirely the result of the lower solar radiation of heat.

The United States should be taking steps to ensure a sufficient supply of electricity to cope with the lower temperatures, but has been wasting billions to support “renewable” energy, wind and solar, that is costly and ineffective. The U.S. Energy Department projects that solar power will make up 0.6 percent of total U.S. electricity generation in 2015. Wind power which is funded in part by taxpayer subsidies to stay in business has received $7.3 billion over the past seven years, but produces a minimal amount of electricity to justify its cost.

At the same time, the Environmental Protection Agency’s “war on coal” has forced many plants providing electricity to close. A significant disruption of electricity over an extended period of time will cause many deaths due to the cold weather. It is inevitable.

At the same time, instead of providing a source of food, tons of corn are being turned into ethanol in the name of reducing carbon dioxide even though CO2 plays no role whatever in a “global warming” that is not happening.

It’s not just another typical winter. The U.S. and much of the northern hemisphere is experiencing increased cooling that is seen in record-breaking and record-setting new amounts of snow and ice. This is a trend tied to the Sun’s and the Earth’s cooling cycle.

That is of no concern to those who are using “global warming” and “climate change” in order to bring about a transformation in the global economic system from capitalism, the most effective creator of growth and wealth, to socialism, a pathetic, failed system of income redistribution controlled by a central government. Directed out of the United Nations, their absurd claims are supported by the media and many deluded politicians.

Is the U.S. government responding in a sensible way? No. When President Obama speaks of “climate change” he means “global warming.” The result over the past three decades has been the waste of billions for “research” and other schemes tied to this huge hoax.

Real climatologists, meteorologists, and scientists paying attention to both the past and to present events are forecasting more intense and longer winters—for now a Little Ice Age.